HUMMER Dealer Starts Selling Guns to Make Ends Meet

With Hummer sales down more than 60 percent in 2009, and General Motors trying to sell the entire company due to its lackluster performance, one dealer is literally pulling out the big guns to make a buck.

The Belleville-News Democrat reports that Jim Lynch Hummer in Chesterfield, Illinois has started selling firearms and ammunition from his showroom to battle the slow economy.

Owner John Lynch says he “didn't have enough business to keep this big, beautiful building going with the decline, so we decided we needed to do something else. And the guns fit in with our customer base... a lot of sportsman, a lot of outdoorsmen, and they've loved it."

The plan was two years in the making, and after getting a license from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, Lynch turned to his staff to move the new metal.

“We were lucky enough we had some people that had been in the gun business, before,” Lynch told the paper. “We had a retired police officer who worked in the parts department that had been a gun dealer and had been a competitive shooter.”